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MATT HAFFNER |
Dreams of a Sleeping Giant |
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Installation View, Dreams of a Sleeping Giant
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Dreams of a Sleeping Giant |
Essay by Dr. Diana McClintock |
Reflecting on the implications of Pictures, a seminal 1977 exhibition for early definitions of Postmodernism, Douglas Crimp identified a new, pervasive use of “media that have the power of replicating the world around us”, and noted “the realm of the imagination has appeared to replace the analytic and perceptual modes of our recent past.”(1) This new postmodern art of “pictures” replaced the transcendental “presentness” of modernist art with an art that is “grounded in the literal temporality and presence of theater,” a function of their presentation as “spatiotemporal fragment[s]” of an unseen narrative.(2) Matt Haffner belongs to the generation of artists reared on Postmodernism’s return to representation, its mining of historical styles and alternative sources, and its deconstruction of expected meanings. Dreams of a Sleeping Giant presents the culmination of the artist’s explorations during a year-long artist-in-residency funded by The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia’s Charles Loridans Foundation Award, and includes work derived from Haffner’s beginnings in black and white photography that draws upon his recent experience producing monumental street art and his interest in comic books and film noir. Haffner’s “pictures” are recognizable yet self-consciously fictitious, and compel the viewer to picture narratives beyond what they present.
The Sleeping Giant and Trepidation present enormous black and white cut-and-pasted paper wall drawings of a bearded man in a flannel shirt and work pants. He could be an urban homeless person or a folktale lumberjack. Haffner was inspired by “Odin the Wanderer,” the Norse God associated with wisdom and war, poetry, magic, and a host of complex and contradictory attributes. Since 1962 Odin has appeared in Marvel Comics as a character created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The peaceful and harmless, or perhaps exhausted and down-and-out Sleeping Giant contrasts sharply with his apprehensive counterpart, and both elicit ambiguous narrative contexts. The figure in Trepidation appears to look anxiously at something as he crouches uneasily within the empty white wall space. Cropped like a close-up snapshot, The Sleeping Giant exists nowhere and anywhere. Their gigantic scale derives from Haffner’s previous series of enormous photographic blow-ups of everyday urban people affixed with wheat paste on walls throughout Atlanta. While his medium bears comparison with his contemporary Kara Walker’s evocative wall-sized installations inspired by Victorian cut-paper silhouettes, the precise detail and overwhelming scale of Haffner’s giants recalls the powerful expression of German medieval and Renaissance woodcuts.
Haffner’s narrative fragments return to a familiar pictorial scale in a series of painted panels with recognizable pulp fiction-type scenes in a Marvel Comics-meets-paint-by-numbers style. Inspired by film noir, especially the campy low-budget, black and white films of Japanese filmmaker Seijun Suzuki, these scenes present cropped and isolated moments of violence, sexual exploitation and innuendo. In Preservation, an attractive young woman in a tight skirt protectively covers a young man lying on an ornately patterned rug. A cold blue light like the artificial glow of a television starkly illuminates the woman against the deep reddish-brown and black of the carpet. In contrast, her partner’s motionless body exists in shades of gray, completely drained of color. Her expression is fiercely defiant as she glares outward as if confronting an intruder. In Abandon a similar young woman presses herself pleadingly against the outside of an automobile windshield. The clean-shaven driver is almost anonymous, until the viewer notices his face in the rearview mirror. It is nighttime on an urban street, and the color scheme and comic-book-style are consistent with the other panels. A handsome young man has just bitch-slapped a pretty, well-dressed young woman in Rapture. In the center of a large room a stout businessman grins eagerly as a thin woman in a short dress approaches. Her head and legs are cropped, but the man’s expression and his visible erection betray his desire. Though less ambiguous, these latter images also create fragments of elusive human narratives.
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The Mystic
Cut paper and video projection
2009
54 x 100 inches |
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The spatiotemporal element of implied narrative becomes more literal in Haffner’s video projections combined with paper cutout drawings. The Wanderer shows a bearded man in a sweater and glasses under a video projection of trees and birds. Odin is referenced by the title and by the birds that fly through the trees (Odin traveled with two ravens). However, this Wanderer is an average middle-aged man, not a god or sorcerer. A worried African-American man wearing a baseball cap is identified as The Psychopomp, a mythological figure who helps humans pass from one state of being to the next. Behind him a strip of small businesses, radio towers and telephone lines are outlined in black, while clouds tumble and build in the projected blue sky. The Mystic is a black youth with wild curly hair who glances back over his shoulder. Projected behind is an elevated MARTA track with brilliant blue sky and rolling clouds. Each cut-out figure extends beyond the video projection, indicating the artificial nature of the hybrid scene and suggesting a narrative that continues outside of the representation.
Matt Haffner’s work in Dreams of a Sleeping Giant mines art history, popular culture and contemporary life for styles, sources and imagery. Haffner pushes beyond the confines of early postmodernism to embrace expressionist styles from the past, ancient cultural traditions as well as pop culture sources. His narratives are fragments that compel viewer participation. His characters are not gods or diviners, but ordinary urban residents made extraordinary through Haffner’s imagination. |
- Dr. Diana McClintock |
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Preservation
2009
Spray paint and acrylic on panel
32 x 72 inches |
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(1) Douglas Crimp, Pictures/An Exhibition of the Work of: Troy Brauntauch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Philip Smith, (New York, NY: Artists Space/Committee for the Visual Arts, 1977, unpaginated).
(2) Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985), 177; Reprinted from October no. 8 (spring 1977) 75-88. |
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